Book Image

Delphi GUI Programming with FireMonkey

By : Andrea Magni
4 (1)
Book Image

Delphi GUI Programming with FireMonkey

4 (1)
By: Andrea Magni

Overview of this book

FireMonkey (FMX) is a cross-platform application framework that allows developers to create exciting user interfaces and deliver applications on multiple operating systems (OS). This book will help you learn visual programming with Delphi and FMX. Starting with an overview of the FMX framework, including a general discussion of the underlying philosophy and approach, you’ll then move on to the fundamentals and architectural details of FMX. You’ll also cover a significant comparison between Delphi and the Visual Component Library (VCL). Next, you’ll focus on the main FMX components, data access/data binding, and style concepts, in addition to understanding how to deliver visually responsive UIs. To address modern application development, the book takes you through topics such as animations and effects, and provides you with a general introduction to parallel programming, specifically targeting UI-related aspects, including application responsiveness. Later, you’ll explore the most important cross-platform services in the FMX framework, which are essential for delivering your application on multiple platforms while retaining the single codebase approach. Finally, you’ll learn about FMX’s built-in 3D functionalities. By the end of this book, you’ll be familiar with the FMX framework and be able to build effective cross-platform apps.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Section 1: Delphi GUI Programming Frameworks
4
Section 2: The FMX Framework in Depth
13
Section 3: Pushing to The Top: Advanced Topics

TImageList

Modern applications tend to have a lot of graphic resources in their UIs. Images are used to implement backgrounds, glyphs of buttons, tabs or list items, icons, and so on. The TImageList component (a name familiar to Delphi VCL developers) implements a collection of images to be used once or multiple times in your application. You can have multiple image lists, and each implements a very effective set of functionalities.

A TImageList instance has the following capabilities:

  • Acts as a centralized repository for multiple images (and each entry is implemented with MultiResBitmap so that it's like a table where the rows are the different images and the columns are the scale factor versions provided for each image).
  • Supports multi-layer images, meaning you can compose an image through overlapping layers, with each one containing a different image.
  • Enables caching, meaning once you have defined your source images (MultiResBitmaps) and destination images (possibly...